A mora (plural morae or moras; often symbolized μ) is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. The definition of a mora varies. In 1968, American linguist James D. McCawley defined it as "something of which a long syllable consists of two and a short syllable consists of one". The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word chronos (time) in its metrical sense.

Monomoraic syllables have one mora, bimoraic syllables have two, and trimoraic syllables have three, although this last type is relatively rare.

Formation

The syllable nucleus represents one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two morae in the case of a long vowel or diphthong. Consonants serving as syllable nuclei also represent one mora if short and two if long. (Slovak is an example of a language that has both long and short consonantal nuclei.)

In some languages (for example, Japanese), the coda represents one mora, and in others (for example, Irish) it does not. In English, the codas of stressed syllables represent a mora (thus, the word cat is bimoraic), but for unstressed syllables it is not clear whether this is true (the second syllable of the word rabbit might be monomoraic).

In some languages, a syllable with a long vowel or diphthong in the nucleus and one or more consonants in the coda is said to be trimoraic (see pluti).

In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Most linguists believe that no language uses syllables containing four or more morae.[citation needed]

A prosodic stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity.[1]

Languages

Ancient Greek

For the purpose of determining accent in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long ē (eta: η) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: ee.[2]

Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute (έ, ή) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel (é, eé). A circumflex (ῆ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel (ée).

Gilbertese

Gilbertese, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati, is a trimoraic language.[3] The typical foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of the sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size."

Hawaiian

In Hawaiian, both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a diphthong, such as oi, consists of two morae, stress may fall only on the first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as io. That is, there is a distinction between oi, a bimoraic syllable, and io, which is two syllables.

Japanese

Japanese is famous for its moraic qualities. Most dialects, including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as haku (拍) or mōra (モーラ), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system.

Writing Japanese in kana (hiragana and katakana) is said by those scholars who use the term mora to demonstrate a moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word mōra, the ō is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ, corresponding here to mo/o/ra, each containing one mora.

Such scholars also argue that haiku in modern Japanese do not follow the pattern five syllables/seven syllables/five syllables, as commonly believed, but rather the pattern five morae/seven morae/five morae.

The Japanese syllable-final n is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", 日本, has two different pronunciations, one with three morae (Nihon) and one with four (Nippon). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of Ni-ho-n are represented by three characters (にほん), and the four morae of Ni-p-po-n need four characters to be written out as にっぽん.

Similarly, the names Tōkyō (to-u-kyo-u とうきょう), Ōsaka (o-o-sa-ka おおさか), and Nagasaki (na-ga-sa-ki ながさき) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they can be said to have two, three and four syllables, respectively.

Sanskrit

In India, the mora was an acknowledged phenomenon well over two millennia ago in ancient Indian linguistics schools studying the dominant scholarly and religious lingua franca of Sanskrit. The mora was first expressed in India as the mātrā.[citation needed]

For example, the short vowel "a" (pronounced like a schwa) is assigned a value of one mātrā, the long vowel "ā" is assigned a value of two mātrās, and the compound vowel (diphthong) "ai" (which has either two simple short vowels, "a"+"i", or one long and one short vowel, "ā"+"i") is assigned a value of two mātrās.[citation needed]

Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into "laghu" (लघु, "light") and "dīrgha" / "guru" (दीर्घ / गुरु, "heavy") feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word.[citation needed]

Thus, for example, the word kartŗ, meaning "agent" or "doer", does not contain, contrary to intuitive English prosodic principles, simply two syllabic units, but contains rather, in order, a "dīrgha" / "guru "/ "heavy" foot and a "laghu" / "light" foot. The reason is that the conjoined consonants 'rt' render the normally light 'ka' syllable heavy.